Yup, the 60s and 70s wrecked everything
Actually, to be honest, I kind of like the 70s — that’s when I was born, the music was epic and not quite as self-consciously serious as the stuff the decade before, and I just love mid-70s design.
But, the decade’s not perfect. And two recent op-eds in the New York Times offer interesting perspectives on how ripples from the late 60s and early 1970s are still wrecking things today.
First — Vietnam protesters? Thought you had morality on your side? Well Larry Pressler says you were a bunch of rich brats getting off on a technicality — a lesson you’ve carried over into business and politics today:
Too many in my generation did a deeply insidious thing. And they got away with it. Big time. Poorer people went to war. The men who didn’t were able to get their head start to power.
Now that flawed thinking has been carried forward. Many of these men who evaded service but claimed idealism lead our elite institutions. The concept of using legal technicalities to evade responsibility has been carried over to playing with derivatives, or to short-changing shareholders. Once my generation got in the habit of saying one thing and believing another, it couldn’t stop.
Now, Pressler writes, those who opposed one war are in charge of another — sending other peoples’ children into harm’s way to assuage their guilt for ducking responsibility.
Slightly too young to protest the draft? You’re no better. David Brooks sees a link between the sky-high crimes rates of the 60s and 1970s and today’s helicopter over-parents:
if you grew up in or near an American city in the 1970s, you grew up with crime (and divorce), and this disorder was bound to leave a permanent mark. It was bound to shape the people, now in their 40s and early-50s, reaching the pinnacles of power.
It has clearly influenced parenting. The people who grew up afraid to go in parks at night now supervise their own children with fanatical attention, even though crime rates have plummeted. It’s as if they’re responding to the sense of menace they felt while young, not the actual conditions of today.
He sees a few more links too — some good, I’ll admit — but his descriptions of New York crimes back then are terrifying: “A serial killer nicknamed Charlie Chop-Off menaced the Upper West Side, emasculating little boys and then killing them, and such was the general disorder that his crimes were barely mentioned in the city’s newspapers.”
I’m very curious to see what will happen in 30 or so years, when the kids of the over-scheduled, over-parented generation grow up and take charge.
For another take on David Brooks check out Driftglass…he’s merciless:
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2010/05/plutocrats-beat-poet.html
“Charlie Chop-Off” killed four boys over a fifteen-month span. His victims lived in tenements, which might help to explain the lack of wider press coverage. When caught, the killer turned out to have religious delusions. And how does that reflect the zeitgeist and the hippies’ agenda, Mr. Brooks?
That first argument’s just awful. It depends on a specious characterization of those who went to war as “responsible” and those who did not as “irresponsible”. And even if we were to accept such simple-minded clap-trap, we’d have to further accept the next leap of idiocy: that of sloppily characterizing that entire generation as the leaders of today, minus the “responsible” ones who went to war, I suppose, which ignores the fact that most of those people are not in positions of leadership at all. They’re a generation of people mostly misled and thrown aside by the system that shaped their expectations, just like their “responsible” brethern.
Sloppy thinkers are like sloppy joes — just because they’re tasty doesn’t mean you should eat ‘em.
In 30 years the robots will have killed us all. Or being using us for batteries. Or the earth will have blown up.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here, and simply ask if anyone here can at least agree with the notion that the ethics — in their personal as well as business life — of the boomers is not a miserable degeneration of their parents’.
Overall, in the macro sense of the idea, of course.